Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Great little article on Siri's everyday uses. Many of these I've already been using myself and look forward to incorporating more of them into my life.

Siri may seem off-putting at first, but it is a super handy tool in that you don't need to use your hands to use it. This often results in quicker input of ideas or reminders. This is important because that extra second or two that it takes to pull my phone out, find the right app and type in the reminder or idea can deter me from doing so. I'll think "whatever, I'll probably remember" or "meh. not worth it" and move on with my day.

The only discomfort I have with the whole procedure is talking to my phone with other people around, so I just avoid doing that. I'll use Siri non-stop when I'm driving alone or walking down the street with headphones, but I tend to just stick to good ol' typing when I'm in the company of others. I probably won't be able to hack Google Glass either.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

I rememberd an old trick I learned when I played more desktop games. Some mice have little plates in them to weigh the device down a bit. Turns out you can extract them and have a lighter, often smoother experience.

On top of that, the last time I took mine apart, I lost a spring in the click-wheel mechanism. Turned out to be a blessing in disguise which I repeated (voluntarily this time) to get the resulting effect. When you scroll the wheel, there is no more resistance or clicking sound to the motion. Once again, a smoother and lighter experience.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

I dove into the Rails source code for the first time ever today. Fixed an issue. It was pretty exciting.

I updated to Ruby 2.0 yesterday, almost immediately after it came out. I was lucky enough to be in a position where I didn't have anything to risk and I figured it would be a fun challenge to get through. I was right and there were a few speed bumps. Today I find that the .dup method is returning an exception.

Didn't really have the balls to do the whole git merging of this code yet and took it as an opportunity to seek the problem lines manually. Got a glimpse of the directory structure of the Rails source code and had a first glance at the innards. Onwards and upwards from here.